Capcom promises to improve Resident Evil Village PC after fans ‘highlight DRM impact’

Capcom has promised to improve Resident Evil Village’s PC performance via an official patch, after a fan-made hack highlighted the overhead taken up by the game’s anti-piracy DRM.

Earlier this week, a technical analysis by Digital Foundry highlighted the significant performance boost created by the fan hack’s removal of Village’s Denuvo DRM.

Denuvo is an anti-tamper technology that has been criticised for its alleged high CPU usage during gameplay, which is claimed to significantly affect performance and frame rates.

“By stripping out what the hackers call Capcom’s entry points for the DRM… the game is absolutely transformed in [specific] areas,” wrote DF editor Richard Leadbetter.

He added: “Fundamentally, the truth is that the cracked version of the game resolves the primary performance issues we encountered at launch, while two months on, those same issues remain unaddressed by Capcom.”

Now Capcom has contacted the publication and claimed that it’s working on a performance update that it says will address the issues highlighted in its analysis.

“The team are working on a patch to address PC performance issues, it should be available soon – we’ll have more details shortly,” a spokesperson for the company said.

The PC version of Resident Evil Village launched with several notable issues for some players. In general combat, for example, it appears that certain animations such as shooting and enemies lurching forward can produce significant stuttering for no apparent reason.

A major drop in performance can also be experienced when players are attacked by swarms of insects, leading to “tremendously high frame times” and “extraordinary” stuttering, according to DF.

Capcom previously removed Denuvo DRM from the PC version of Devil Mary Cry V, resulting in claims of drastically improved framerates of up to 20fps for some users.

It also removed Denuvo from another of its 2019 titles, Resident Evil 2, via a post-release update.